Thought I'd share my experiences with you as I had a LOT of trouble installing Mint 13 and finally have it up and running. This is how I did it.NOTE: this is based on the setup I have which is an i7 2700k processor in a ASUS Maximus Gene-Z IV mobo with an nVidia GTX570 graphics card.

My first problem was booting from the live CD (in my case from a USB stick) - I couldn't get it to work.The first thing to do is reboot your computer and make sure your BIOS is setup so booting from USB is higher priority than booting from your hard drive. In my BIOS I have boot override options so I can just click to boot from USB.

Then I got the grey Linux Mint 13 splash screen with a countdown from 10 till boot. At the point it tried to boot, I was just getting a blank grey screen with the cursor flashing in the corner. The trick to make the live CD boot is as follows:

As soon as you see the splash screen with the countdown from 10, hit F6. This will open a menu with other boot options.Highlight the default boot option and press TAB to edit the boot parameters. Where it says "quiet splash", add nomodeset to the end so it says "quiet splash nomodeset"Apparently, nomodeset is needed for Mint 13 to work with nVidia graphics cards.Then you should be able to boot the live CD and install Linux Mint 13.

BUT, here's where more problems start. I had removed Windows so Linux was the only operating system installed on my PC.Once it had successfully installed and I tried to boot from my HDD where Linux was now installed, it didn't work, it just froze on a black screen. I had no way of changing the boot parameters to add nomodeset as now I couldn't even get as far as the splash screen with the countdown!

To get round this I had to avoid using my nVidia graphics card and use my onboard graphics (luckily I had the i7 and ASUS mobo!)To do this, I booted into my BIOS and changed my settings so the graphics was iGPU (onboard graphics) instead of PCIE (the nVidia graphics card)Then I plugged my monitors HD lead into the onboard HDMI out (instead of the nVidia HDMI out) and rebooted.Now Linux 13 booted successfully.

The first thing to do is set the boot parameters to always use nomodeset. To do this, open a terminal and type

Edit the lineGRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splah"toGRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splah nomodeset"as we did when getting it to boot from the live CD.Save and exit the file and in the terminal type:

Then reboot and goto into your BIOS.Change the graphics back to use you nVidia graphics card.Plug your HDMI lead back into your nVidia graphics card and reboot.Now you should be able to successfully boot Linux Mint 13 using your nVidia graphics card instead of the onboard graphics.

If you have problems one you're up & running in Linux, you may need to install the latest nVidia drivers (I needed to do this to get things working properly)

I appreciate this guide will be useless to most however this is just the problems that I had and this was how I got things working.If it helps at least one person out there then it was worth it.

I also had a bit of trouble installing Mint 13 because of nVidia 550 card.There is another way around the boot issue without having to switch back and forth between your video cards:

As soon as you see your BIOS screen, hold down your SHIFT key until you get the GRUB screen. Holding down shift will allow you to always get into GRUB whether or not you have it set to always load.This allows you to add nomodeset as you described, load into your new installation and grab your 'additional drivers' for your nvidia card. Once you have done that and rebooted, no more graphics issues.

Another option is to get to GRUB, use the second boot option in the list (for repairs / compatibility), (menu will appear after a few) enable networking, drop to root, then use apt-get to grab everything you need.

This method has gotten me further than before, however, it is still not working. When I enter "nomodeset" I have "quiet splash nomodeset --". Is this correct? When I go through with booting Linux Mint like this, it shows the boot logo but then it disappears and goes to a black screen which it stays at.

Hello,Thanks a lot! After a lot of struggling, surfing for solutions, I found your post and it did the trick.

My situation described:an IBM Netvista 8305 21G (about year 2001) with on board graphics (Brookdale-G Graphics).I wanted to install Mint 13, went fine until I actually restarted the PC to use the installed version. The PC froze, scrambled screen, blank screen. Hard reset was the only way to start again. I could determine the problem to graphics (after replacing the harddisk) and searched for ways to do a low res startup. As a newbie to grub and mint I tried several suggestions with no effect. Yours being very simple and elegant, saved my day (weekend) and prevented me from advicing not to use mint.